Why Is Pitchfork Adding Comments to Their Reviews?

Earlier this week, Pitchfork announced their plan to add comments and reader scores to their reviews next year. Here’s how it’ll work:

Coming in 2026, as Pitchfork celebrates its 30th anniversary, we’re finally planning to add a comments section to all of our album reviews. That’s over 30,000 pieces of music criticism on which you’ll be able to leave your own Pitchfork review for the very first time. We can’t wait for your takes to be on our website.

In addition to commenting, you will also have the opportunity to add your own score to an album review using Pitchfork’s rating system. This score will be shown next to your comment and will be aggregated with other readers to form a “reader score” alongside Pitchfork’s official score. One album review, our score, your score, followed by some comments.

All of which immediately prompts one question: Why in the world would they think this is a good idea?

Although it doesn’t enjoy the same cultural cachet that it possessed 10 – 15 years ago, Pitchfork is still a major music website known for taste-making and blunt reviews, and as such, it still generates strong reactions. Which means those comments will be a nightmare to manage should Pitchfork open commenting to the public. To paraphrase a friend, do you really think Swifties will let Anna Gaca get away with giving The Life of a Showgirl a mere 5.9? If there was truly an interest in fostering discussion, then Pitchfork’s in-depth features would seem like a better candidate for comments than reviews; the latter are virtually guaranteed to generate little but knee-jerk reactions.

So who, exactly, decided to add comments to Pitchfork’s reviews? I doubt it was the site’s writers. Indeed, I can only imagine their reaction when they got the news, and the realization that there could soon be yet another way for readers to tell them just how wrong and stupid they are.

No, I’m fairly certain this decision was made entirely in Condé Nast’s C-suite in order to drive up engagement and collect data, thereby squeezing just a wee bit more money from a website that’s already been gutted. As The Quietus’s Luke Turner put it, “I imagine this has nowt to do with wanting the readership’s opinion, and 100% about maximising page refreshes and scraping the last few dollars and cents from the bust barrel of advertising.”